


i leave you my fingerprints and you remember me

by rgdivine



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: (becoming nobodies), Blood, Gen, Heart removal, Implied Violence Against Children, Implied/Referenced Character Death, apprentice nort appears briefly, this is the post bbs when-they-become-nobodies bit so dont take my warnings lightly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23190952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rgdivine/pseuds/rgdivine
Summary: when the light faded from the room they were left alone on the floor. it was a moment overlooked, because they should have been gone by then, but it wasn't like they were going anywhere, or that they would know where to go even if they could stand up. it's what they do with the last few moments of "lea" and "isa" that counts.(transferred from twitter!)
Relationships: Isa/Lea (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	i leave you my fingerprints and you remember me

If anything could be said about the moment, it was that it hadn’t really sunk in yet. It was that there was a cold tile floor beneath his chest and a faint blue glow to his left and slung over his shoulder blades was a familiar warm arm and tickling his ear was the moon shaped pendant on a silver metal band. It was that Isa ached, and he wasn’t entirely sure he should be conscious.

Lea groaned, soft, almost inaudible—more than he could hear it, Isa could feel it vibrating in the arm over his back, and his voice sounded distant, and more concerning, it sounded pained, and Isa struggled to lift his head, even to open his eyes. Somewhere near them, he could hear footsteps retreating, a cool voice calling words he could hear but couldn’t even begin to process to a recipient he didn’t know. The voice. He knew the voice, but he couldn’t place it.

Everything was foggy, broken. He couldn’t—He couldn’t remember.

Where was he?

Lea groaned again, louder, broken like a cry, the call of agony of the dying on the abandoned plains of the battlefield and Isa decided through the haze that none of the rest of it mattered, because as long as he knew Lea and knew that Lea was hurting, that was what counted. With effort, he opened his eyes.

Laying at his side, half-curled rather than sprawled like Isa, was Lea, who had dragged green eyes open much faster than Isa had managed to, and their eyes met. Immediately, Lea’s began to well with salty tears.

He looked a mess. His face was scuffed, dirtied, and tear tracks cut through the dust and left a glittering path behind, that Isa tried not to get mesmerized by (his head hurt, he wondered distantly if he’d been concussed; usually, the tracks of tears didn’t seem so fascinating). His scarf was gone, as was his vest—he was dressed only in his white tank and a pair of blue sweatpants that Isa knew didn’t belong to him, though he could not say who they _did_ belong to, but for that they were a little long on him.

Evidently, though, as bad as Lea looked, Isa looked worse. After a few tries, Lea whimpered; “Isa, you’re bleeding.”

Was he? Isa tried to remember how to move his hand. A wiggle of his fingers became a lift of his hand, and he brought it with agonizing slowness to his face, touched a spot of wet beneath his eye, then drew it back to look at the blood on his fingers.

 _Pretty,_ he thought. Dazedly, he brought up the other hand, repeated the action on the opposite side. He was certainly bleeding.

“Isa-a!”

Right. Other things to focus on. Isa looked back at Lea, who had managed to pull himself upright, sitting half-crumpled into himself, eyes wide, face sticky with tears and the detritus that came along with it. Sitting up. Isa should try that.

He pulled himself onto his elbows, but that was as far as he made it. He wasn’t really sure how Lea was so aware, but he for himself felt empty of something he knew he should have. Lea was there at his side, and with his help, Isa was kneeling then, some of his weight on Lea’s arms.

Maybe he should have realized something was wrong then, but he couldn’t really remember that Lea shouldn’t have had that strength.

“’m fine,” Isa said through the feeling of cotton in his mouth. The bleeding wasn’t anything to worry about, he tried to say, but that was too much for his brain to tell his mouth, so he just hoped instead that Lea understood.

And he seemed to, because he didn’t say anything else about it. That may also have been because he was sniffling, sobbing.

“Isa,” He said again, the rises and catches of his voice, the tussocks that Isa has had memorized for years now, the ones that he knows their touch and feel by heart, are broken by the furrows of sobs. Isa felt like he should have had something else to do, to say, to feel, but he can’t remember it.

“Lea,” He breathed instead.

“It _hurts,_ ” Lea sobbed, and one hand left Isa’s waist to wipe at his own face instead, more of a clawing than a gentle brushing of tears. There was no tenderness left in the world, or at least insofar as the world encompassed these two boys. There was only pain.

Isa couldn’t feel inside Lea’s chest—he resided within that boy’s heart, but he was unaware of that, and it wasn’t the sort of residency that granted him understanding of its feelings, but _could_ he have felt it, and _had_ he been aware of it, he might have known a little bit better what was the matter. Two empty chests resonated in this room, the room that became the entire world. One, stunned and aching, bled and felt numb. The other, terrified and aching, cried and felt alone. Lea could never stand feeling alone.

Isa pressed forward, brought his hands to warm skin. He always ran cool—or he did in this moment, because the past meant nothing to him, and whether or not he and Lea were always perfect temperature offsets to one another meant nothing to him. But he ran cold and Lea ran warm and together they were _perfect,_ and even if the numbness never went away, or the heaviness in his body, and even if Lea never stopped crying, Isa thought that maybe he could keep the moment like this forever, and it would be okay.

_I was reading in the library, when you weren’t doing your work, as usual._

_Aw, why do you haf’ta say it like that? I still did fine on the test!_

_Shut up, I’m trying to tell you something. I was reading, and I found this spell. It’s supposed to make you stop crying._

_What, like, me specifically, or—_

_Ugh, Lea! No, it’s just a general thing. Anyway, I thought—_

_They wrote a spell just for me!_

_Lea!_

They were thinking of the same thing. Isa could tell by the way that watery green eyes met Isa’s, filled with pain, with agony and despair. He could tell by the way that Lea begged him: “Make it stop.”

The words were the hardest. As if he picked one thing to remember, they came easily to his head, but _saying_ them, that was its own challenge. The clinging heaviness, the fatigue, the numbness, that didn’t help, but he knew—he _knew_ —that what was happening wasn’t okay, even before he knew what was happening. Still, he pressed his fingers to Lea’s cheeks and whispered the spell.

It sounded like static when it came from his mouth. He wouldn’t remember the words, but he didn’t care. He cared that Lea stopped crying, and if he got some words wrong, it didn’t matter. Spells, like hearts and like bad people, care not what your actions are, but what your intentions were.

He watched Lea’s tears fall, watched them dry on his face, watched his eyes clear of them. The agony lingered, for a moment, before it, too, flickered out. And he felt—for a fleeting moment, for just a _moment,_ he _felt_ —he felt good about it. Like he’d done something, his final oath, his final debt.

When Isa’s fingers slipped from Lea’s face, they left behind identical smears, left behind the marker of Isa’s life, the essence of it, dripping purple down his face, taking the place of the tears that had moments before left their tracks there.

Purple?

Isa gazed at it a second longer, smiling a little bit as the edges of his vision grew fuzzy. The meeting of blue and red, the final touch before the end.

The footsteps were returning to them, and Lea looked to the side. Isa would have liked to as well, but if anything could be said about the moment, it was that it was finally sinking in, and he slumped forward a little bit, hands falling, trying to curl themselves in Lea’s tank, in his skin, in something _real,_ but he couldn’t make his fingers do what he told them to.

“Damn it, they’re still awake—Vexen, I thought you…"

There was a man above their heads, and Isa couldn’t make out what he was saying through the dizzying, drowning static in his ear. None of what he was saying really mattered anyway, because the warmth of Lea was suddenly gone as he was thrown a few feet away. Isa saw the blur of purple, the blur of red and white, saw the man step over his limp body and towards Lea, and then his eyes slipped closed. Burned on the inside of his eyelids were identical purple smears.

_With this, you won’t have to cry anymore._

_Isa… I don’t need that, if I’m with you! Who cares if I cry?_

And if Lea carried into him the beyond some remnant on his skin of Isa’s life, the memory that _Isa_ touched him, that _Isa_ loved him, that _Isa_ was his, then Isa had no objections to that.

**Author's Note:**

> anyway i just think it'd be neat if the upside down tears were smears of isa's fingerprints in a moment of hazy desperation, leaving his mark on lea. goodbye
> 
> i'm on twitter at @glaceydiviner! come say hello


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